CERN’s Large Hadron Collider Runs On A Bendix G-15 In 2025

August 25, 2025 by Adam Fabio 2 Comments

The Bendix G-15 refurbished by [David at Usagi Electric] is well known as the oldest digital computer in North America. The question [David] gets most is “what can you do with it?”. Well, as a general-purpose computer, it can do just about anything. He set out to prove it. Can a 1950s-era vacuum tube computer handle modern physics problems? This video was several years in the making, was a journey from [David’s] home base in Texas all the way to CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland.

The G-15 can run several “high-level” programming languages, including Algol. The most popular, though, was Intercom. Intercom is an interactive programming language – you can type your program in right at the typewriter. It’s much closer to working with a basic interpreter than, say, a batch-processed IBM 1401 with punched cards. We’re still talking about the 1950s, though, so the language mechanics are quite a bit different from what we’re used to today.

To start with, [Usagi’s] the G-15 is a numeric machine. It can’t even handle the full alphabet. What’s more, all numbers on the G-15 are stored as floating-point values. Commands are sent via operation codes. For example, ADD is operation 43. You have to wrangle an index register and an address as well. Intercom feels a bit like a cross between assembler and tokenized BASIC. Continue reading “CERN’s Large Hadron Collider Runs On A Bendix G-15 In 2025” →

The 32 Bit 6502 You Never Had

August 24, 2025 by Jenny List 32 Comments

In the beginning was the MOS6502, an 8-bit microprocessor that found its way into many famous machines. Some of you will know that a CMOS 6502 was created by the Western Design Center, and in turn, WDC produced the 65C816, a 16-bit version that was used in the Apple IIgs as well as the Super Nintendo. It was news to us that they had a 32-bit version in their sights, but after producing a datasheet, they never brought it to market. Last October, [Mike Kohn] produced a Verilog version of this W65C832 processor, so it can be experienced via an FPGA.

The description dives into the differences between the 32, 16, and 8-bit variants of the 6502, and we can see some of the same hurdles that must have faced designers of other chips in that era as they moved their architectures with the times while maintaining backwards compatibility. From our (admittedly basic) understanding it appears to retain that 6502 simplicity in the way that Intel architectures did not, so it’s tempting to imagine what future might have happened had this chip made it to market. We’re guessing that you would still be reading through an Intel or ARM, but perhaps we might have seen a different path taken by 1990s game consoles.

If you’d like to dive deeper into 6502 history, the chip recently turned 50.

Thanks [Liam Proven] for the tip.

Dealing With The 1970s EPROM Chaos In 2025

August 23, 2025 by Maya Posch 11 Comments

It could be argued that erasable programmable ROMs (EPROMs) with their quaint UV-transparent windows are firmly obsolete today in an era of various flavors of EEPROMs. Yet many of these EPROMs are still around, and people want to program them. Unfortunately, the earliest EPROMs were made during a time when JEDEC standardization hadn’t taken root yet, leading to unique pinouts, programming voltages, and programming sequences, as [Anders Nielsen] explains in a recent video.

[Anders]’s Relatively Universal-ROM-Programmer project recently gained the ability to program even the oldest types of EPROMs, something which required modifying the hardware design to accommodate EPROMs like Ti’s TMS2716 and the similar-but-completely-different TMS2516. Although not the hardest thing to support – requiring just a diode and resistor added to the BOM along with a firmware update – it’s just one of those pre-standardization traps.

As [Anders] put it, it’s sometimes good to be unencumbered by the burden of future knowledge. Who would have willingly subjected themselves to the chaos of incompatible pinouts, voltages, etc., if they had known beforehand that in a few years EEPROMs and JEDEC standardization would make life so much easier? Maybe that’s why messing with retro hardware like this is fun, as afterwards you can go back to the future.

Continue reading “Dealing With The 1970s EPROM Chaos In 2025” →

Picking An Old Operating System

August 23, 2025 by Al Williams 29 Comments

We usually at least recognize old computer hardware and software names. But [Asianmoetry] taught us a new one: Pick OS. This 1960s-era system was sort of a database and sort of an operating system for big iron used by the Army. The request was for an English-like query language, and TRW assigned two guys, Don Nelson and Dick Pick, to the job.

The planned query language would allow for things like “list the title, author, and abstract of every transportation system reference with the principal city ‘Los Angeles’.” This was GIM or generalized information management, and, in a forward-looking choice, it ran in a virtual machine.

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Back To The 90s On Real Hardware

August 22, 2025 by Bryan Cockfield 8 Comments

As the march of time continues on, it becomes harder and harder to play older video games on hardware. Part of this is because the original hardware itself wears out, but another major factor is that modern operating systems, software, and even modern hardware don’t maintain support for older technology indefinitely. This is why emulation is so popular, but purists that need original hardware often have to go to extremes to scratch their retro gaming itch. This project from [Eivind], for example, is a completely new x86 PC designed for the DOS and early Windows 98 era.

The main problem with running older games on modern hardware is the lack of an ISA bus, which is where the sound cards on PCs from this era were placed. This build uses a Vortex86EX system-on-module, which has a processor running a 32-bit x86 instruction set. Not only does this mean that software built for DOS can run natively on this chip, but it also has this elusive ISA capability. The motherboard uses a Crystal CS4237B chip connected to this bus which perfectly replicates a SoundBlaster card from this era. There are also expansion ports to add other sound cards, including ones with Yamaha OPL chips.

Not only does this build provide a native hardware environment for DOS-era gaming, but it also adds a lot of ports missing from modern machines as well including a serial port. Not everything needs to be original hardware, though; a virtual floppy drive and microSD card reader make it easy to interface minimally with modern computers and transfer files easily. This isn’t the only way to game on new, native hardware, though. Others have done similar things with new computers built for legacy industrial applications as well.

Thanks to [Stephen] for the tip!

Continue reading “Back To The 90s On Real Hardware” →

Now That Commodore Is Back, Could Amiga Be Next?

August 21, 2025 by Tyler August 46 Comments

Now that Commodore has arisen from the depths of obscurity like Cthulhu awoken from R’lyeh, the question on every shoggoth’s squamose lips is this: “Will there be a new Commodore Amiga?” The New Commodore is reportedly interested, but as [The Retro Shack] reports in the video embedded below, it might be some time before the stars align.

He follows the tortured history of the Amiga brand from its origins with Hi-Toro, the Commodore acquisition and subsequent Atari lawsuit, and the post-Commodore afterlife of the Amiga trademark. Yes, Amiga had a life after Commodore, and that’s the tl;dr here: Commodore might be back, but it does not own the Amiga IP.

If you’re wondering who does, you’re not the only one. Cloanto now claims the name and most of Amiga’s IP, though it remains at loggerheads with Hyperion, the distributors of AmigaOS 4. If you haven’t heard of them, Cloanto is not an elder god, but in fact the group behind Amiga Forever. They have been great stewards of the Amiga heritage over the decades. Any “new” Amiga is going to need the people at Cloanto on board, one way or another. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible– the new Commodore might be able to seduce Cloanto into a merger, or even just a licensing agreement to use the name on reproduction or new hardware.

While a replica C=64 was a no-brainer for the revived Commodore brand, it’s not quite so clear what they should do with the Amiga name. An FPGA reproduction of the popular A500 or A1200? Would anyone want newly-made 68000-based machines, or to follow Hyperion and MorphOS to now-outdated generations of PowerPC? All of these have been proposed and argued over for years.

We’d love to see something fully new that captures the spirit of the bouncing ball, but it’s hard to imagine bottling magic like that in the twenty-first century. For now, Amiga lies dreaming– but that is not dead which can eternally lie, and we hold out hope this Great Old One can return when the stars are right.

Continue reading “Now That Commodore Is Back, Could Amiga Be Next?” →

The PC In Your Pico

August 18, 2025 by Jenny List 33 Comments

We’re all used to emulating older computers here, and we’ve seen plenty of projects that take a cheap microcontroller and use it to emulate a classic home computer or gaming platform. They’re fun, but serve mostly as a way to relive old toys.

As microcontrollers become faster though it’s inevitable that the machines they can emulate become more powerful too, so we’re moving into the realm of emulating productivity machines from years past. An example is [Ilya Maslennikov]’s pico-286, which as its name suggests, is a 286 PC emulator for the Raspberry Pi Pico.

It has an impressive set of sound and video card emulations, can drive either a VGA or an HDMI monitor, and uses a PS/2 keyboard and mouse. If DOS games are your thing it should provide what you want, but it’s caught our eye because there was a time when a 286 DOS PC was a productivity machine. There’s a huge library of still-useful software for DOS, and thus the prospect of a handheld DOS PC still has some appeal. We’d love to see someone put this in a badge.

MS-DOS may no longer be for sale, but there are several ways to land an open-source DOS in 2025. FreeDOS is something of a powerhouse.